- Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life
Oscar-winning short film by Peter Capaldi starring Richard E. Grant.
- Migration and the least advantaged
Is there a good leftist argument against migration? (No.)
August Books 2) Kraken, by China Miéville
London does fit well as a setting for intense occult novels – its long history of being a storehouse of knowledge and ritual, and the intimacy demanded of you if you want to engage with its geography: historical landmarks above ground, Underground stations below. Kraken reminded me very much both of Paul Cornell’s London Falling and of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere; perhaps more of the former, in that the plot involves an occult police team (though here they are not the central characters) pursuing an ancient and murderous mystery, though some of the details along the way are more Gaimanesque. After a strong start, with the theft of a giant squid exhibit from a museum, there are lots of good touches but it didn’t quite come together as I had hoped. Unusually mainstream for Miéville, which I don’t see as necessarily a Bad Thing.
August Books 1) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie
I remember when I first read this, a third of a century ago, and my shock at the twist ending, one of the best ever executed in crime literature. I reread it last week, for the first time since then, assessing whether Christie is “fair”; is the solution pulled out of thin air for gratuitous effect? Or are there in fact clues that the alert reader might pick up?
And my conclusion is that it’s pretty fair. The are a couple of important clues in the early chapters right up to the discovery of Roger Ackroyd’s body; we are then misdirected by the seething discontent and deceit of the Ackroyd household, which presents several sub-plots which have to be resolved one by one, until we are left only with the original question. Unlike And Then There Were None and Murder On The Orient Express, this is a pretty ordinary crime, done for ordinary reasons, extraordinary only in the way the solution is revealed, and I think all the stronger for it.
Roger Ackroyd is not poisoned, but there has been a poisoning shortly before the story starts, and it ends with another. In fact I believe that poison is a relatively rare method of murder, both in real life and in fiction (for Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures are often, like Ackroyd, narrated by a doctor, I can remember only A Study in Scarlet; for Ian Rankin, I can’t remember any at all). Unfortunately we have killing and death constantly with us; Agatha Christie’s genius is to isolate these fears by using bizarre methods and nested circles of isolation where these events take place – the secluded village, containing Ackroyd’s house which is in it yet distanced from it, in turn containing Ackroyd’s study where he must not be disturbed.
I’m watching Poirot with interest for signs of Belgicity. (Saying septante instead of soixante-dix, that kind of thing.) Nothing yet to indicate that he is other than an eccentric Frenchman, alas. The least plausible parts of the novel are the rapidity with which he takes the narrator and his nosy sister into his confidence, and his decision (as in Murder On The Orient Express) to thwart state enforcement of justice in favour of his own interpretation of natural justice. Perhaps the second of these is a case of implementing the famous Belgian saying, on s’arrange, but I don’t really think so.
Anyway, I’m enjoying these much more than Lovejoy. The only problem is that murder mysteries are not great as insomnia reading…
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Peril at End House | Lord Edgware Dies | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | The Moving Finger | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party | Sleeping Murder
Twelve Who companions
Bernice Summerfield (Lisa Bowerman), Ace (Sophie Aldred), Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Tegan (Janet Fielding), Leela (Louise Jameson), Romana II (Lalla Ward), K9 (John Leeson), Victoria (Deborah Watling), Susan (Carole Ann Ford), and Jo Grant (Katy Manning) are entertained by Polly (Anneke Wills) in Slough earlier today.
June Books 22-24) Misschien, Nooit, Ooit, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre
A trilogy of short graphic novels, scripts by Marc Legendre and art by Kristof Spaey, which tell the story of a young photographer in Antwerp whose mysterious new lover, and his ostensible sister, appear to be involved with the nasty end of orgnaised crime in the back streets of Antwerp. The particular gimmick here – which is very effective – is that the three volumes are told from different perspectives, the young woman, her lover, and the Cambodian-Belgian policeman involved with the case, so that scenes we saw in one installment are replayed with quite a different meaning in a later volume. More importantly, we get new and important background information about the central characters in each volume. Spaey’s art is superb, and I’ll look out for more from him. The story is convincing and the narrative structure is engaging.
I was dismayed at the casual use of “spleetoog” by several of the characters. My impression is that it is a pretty offensive word for people with east and southeast Asian heritage. The third volume, told from the perspective of a Belgian policeman with roots in that culture, missed the opportunity to redress the balance.
July Books
A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf
Shakespeare’s Handwriting: A Study, by Edward Maunde Thompson
Katherine Swynford: The History of a Medieval Mistress, by Jeannette Lucraft
Fiction (non-sf) 9 (YTD 23)
The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston
Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol
Desert, by J.M.G. Le Clézio
Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo
The Last Empress, by Anchee Min
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
Spend Game, by Jonathan Gash
Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens
SF (non-Who) 4 (YTD 40)
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov
Kiss of the Butterfly, by James Lyon
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 37)
Harvest of Time, by Alastair Reynolds
The Also People, by Ben Aaronovitch
Vanishing Point, by Steve Cole
Plague of the Cybermen, by Justin Richards
The Ripple Effect, by Malorie Blackman
Comics 3 (YTD 19)
Misschien, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre
Nooit, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre
Ooit, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre
~6,600 pages (YTD 37,100)
8/24 (YTD 38/141) by women (Woolf, Lucraft, Hurston, Min, Christiex2, Collins, Blackman)
3/24 (YTD 7/141) by PoC (Hurston, Min, Blackman)
Rereads: And Then There Were None– 1 (YTD 7).
Acquired 2011 or before: 6 (YTD 46) – The Also People, Vanishing Point, Confessions of Zeno, Desert, Dead Souls, Katherine Swynford.
Acquired 2012: 3 (YTD 20) – The Pickwick Papers, Fantastic Voyage, The Jagged Orbit
Acquired 2013: 15 (YTD 75) – The Last Empress, Misschien, Nooit, Ooit, The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston, Plague of the Cybermen, A Room of One’s Own, Mockingjay, Harvest of Time, Spend Game, Shakespeare’s Handwriting, Kiss of the Butterfly, And Then There Were None, The Ripple Effect, Murder on the Orient Express
Reading now:
Kraken, by China Mieville
Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin
The Monsters and the Critics, by J R R Tolkien
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie
Coming Next (perhaps):
The History of the Hobbit v. 1: Mr Baggins, by John D. Rateliff
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
Shakespeare’s Planet, by Clifford D. Simak
Far North & Other Dark Tales by Sara Maitland
A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland
Streetlethal by Steven Barnes
The Crown of Dalemark by Diana Wynne Jones
Eleanor, Countess of Desmond by Anne Chambers
Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb
Rebus’s Scotland: A Personal Journey, by Ian Rankin
The Tunnel at the End of the Light, by Stefan Petrucha
The Adventures Of Luther Arkwright, by Bryan Talbot
The Theology of the Gospel of Mark, by W. R. Telford
The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman
The Moment of Eclipse, by Brian Aldiss
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Far Side Of The World, by Patrick O’Brian
The Flood, by Ian Rankin
Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber
Clean, by Katherine Ashenburg
The Wages of Sin, by David A. McIntee
Shakedown, by Terrance Dicks
Eater of Wasps, by Trevor Baxendale
The Dalek Generation, by Nicholas Briggs
Links I found interesting for 31-07-2013
- Three publications on espionage from the General Intelligence and Security Service of the Netherlands.
Worth a read.
- Spain’s Down Syndrome councillor makes history
…though many with her condition barred from voting.
- The Most Important Life Lesson Older People Want Younger Ones to Know
"Don’t stay in a job you dislike."
- Vicky Pryce stripped of her honour – but who are the Honours Forfeiture Committee to decide? | Stephen Tall
Good question.
July Books 21) The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens
‘We want to know, in the first place,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘whether you have any reason to be discontented with your present situation.’
‘Afore I answers that ‘ere question, gen’l’m’n,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘I should like to know, in the first place, whether you’re a-goin’ to purwide me with a better?’
I got to page 118 of this and was beginning to despair, to the point that I actually put out a plaintive Tweet/Facebook post wondering if there would be a funny bit soon. But in fact Sam Weller arrives to rescue the book at the end of page 119, thank heavens; although there is a lot of snobbish condescension in Dickens’ portrayal of him, he is also given some penetrating insights and just some generally good lines.
There’s a defence of The Pickwick Papers which would be similar to what apologists for some parts of Old Who might say: reading this as a novel is contrary to the author’s original intent – it was written as a series of humorous installments, when Dickens was 24, and today’s reader’s experience of it is analogous to the puzzled New Who fan who puts on the newly bought DVD of An Unearthly Child for their first experience of Old Who.
Yet at the same time, that’s not really good enough. The book is presented as a novel, and has been since 1837, only a few months after the original publication (unlike An Unearthly Child, broadcast in 1963 and released on video only in 1990), so I think it’s fair to criticise its failings as a novel. Pickwick himself is much less clever than he realises, which is not actually all that funny at first and gets less funny as the book wears on. The plot, such as it is, revolves around some terribly conventional farce tropes which were old-fashioned when Plautus did them in about 200 BC, linking together various set-piece sketches of life in the old days (ie about a decade before the book was actually written).
But what makes the book is a) Weller’s sardonic commentary, and b) some of the set-pieces. The Eatanswill by-election is still a favourite among us political types, but reading it in context I was struck that the author’s emphasis – and the element from the episode that returns later in the book – is actually on the two local newspapers, who feud with each other in a gloriously fannish style which is very recognisable today. The ghost stories which punctuate various chapters are also neatly done for their type (in general better than the average Poe story) with The Bagman’s Tale, in one of the later chapters, surely one of the first examples of a time travel romance in literature?
The Pickwick Papers is a long old slog, however, and I think the casual reader could be excused for seeking out the edited highlights only.
The chewing habits of the Beech Marten
Until today, I was blithely unaware of the existence of the beech marten (fouine in French, steenmarter or fluwijn in Dutch). After a conversation with the garage who just serviced my car, I am now aware not only of its existence but of its potentially expensive chewing habits. (See also pages 6-7 here.)
Links I found interesting for 29-07-2013
- Opposition wins Turkish Cypriot elections #fb
Crushing defeat for outgoing government.
High Street, Belfast
| Here are men in tricorn hats And lownecked belles, all full of chat, Blocking the vista to the docks; The loosed-out carts It's twenty to four Coming perhaps from the Linen Hall In twelve years time And this tricorned fop Fence and fetch us in It's twenty to four Smell the tidal Lagan: Seamus Heaney
|
Here is the same scene rather more recently in Google Maps, presumably taken on a Sunday when all the shops were closed.
(How did Seamus Heaney know it was twenty to four? I can't see any clocks in the earlier picture. Maybe it's poetic licence.)
July Books 20) Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
Poirot was silent a minute. Then he said: “If you will be so good, M. Hardman, assemble everyone here. There are two possible solutions of this case. I want to lay them both before you all.”
I had not actually read this Agatha Christie novel before, though of course I knew whodunnit as it has been widely spoilered in popular culture. There is still a thrill in watching the insanely convoluted plot (both story and conspiracy) come together, and I patted myself on the back for picking up the one clue that Poirot misses (the monogrammed handkerchief). It’s also interesting for just how much the backstory draws on the real-life Lindbergh kidnapping, which had happened two years before the book’s publication; the similarities will not have been lost on the contemporary audience. The resolution does require impressive ability to deceive Poirot, at least initially, on the part of those responsible, and his moral choice at the end is a bit questionable (though not the only time this happens; I shall be keeping count).
But there is extra fascination for today’s reader in the locations described. The opening scene of the book is the railway station in Aleppo, where Poirot is joining the train that started in Baghdad (with a break between Kirkuk and Nisibis). It’s extraordinary for us now to imagine that route being a relatively unremarkable train journey, the year after Hitler took power in Germany. (Agatha Christie of course knew it well because of her visits to husband’s excavations near Nineveh.)
For me the setting came even closer to personal experience when I realised that the actual murder takes place just outside Vinkovci, which I knew in 1998 as a traumatised frontline town recovering painfully from the recent conflict. In December of that year, with wife and small child, I drove past Vinkovci on the former Highway of Brotherhood and Unity through heavy snow, got turned back at the Serbian frontier after navigating the minefields, and finally found a hotel bed in the smashed urban moonscape of Vukovar. So although the area around the likely scene of the crime is actually fairly densely populated, I did feel shudders of sympathy. (See also Saki’s short story, “The Name Day“, for another creepy story of being stuck in a snowbound train carriage in the future Yugoslavia.)
I think as a mystery novel this is actually better than And Then There Were None; the story is more representative of the genre, there is somewhat less overt racism (gosh, a sympathetic Jewish character!), and the plot is slightly less implausible. I admit that these are fairly fine grades of distinction.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Peril at End House | Lord Edgware Dies | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | The Moving Finger | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party | Sleeping Murder
July Books 19) Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
“Sometime in the near future, this war will be resolved. A new leader will be chosen,” says Boggs.
I roll my eyes. “Boggs, no one thinks I’m going to be the leader.”
“No. They don’t,” he agrees. “But you’ll throw support to someone. Would it be President Coin? Or someone else?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it,” I say.
“If your immediate answer isn’t Coin, then you’re a threat.”
In the concluding volume of the Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss has to work out not so much how to win the war against the regime of President Snow – that part seems to be working reasonably well, now that the rebellion has actually started – but also how to prevent it from being replaced by something just as bad, or worse. There’s some pretty sane political critique in the trilogy, most especially of media culture and of authoritarianism, and that comes to a peak here when Katniss makes an agonising choice in the final pages (one which, judging from the internets, is actually lost on some readers). There’s a harrowing sequence of her penetrating to the heart of the capitol, in constant danger and losing allies at every step, and of course with unresolved romance issues which she is forced to repress at significant emotional cost. I come away thinking that the first is the best of the three volumes, and one can read it without needing to learn what happens next, but this is a decent conclusion.
There was a remarkable story in the Economist a couple of months back about the adoption of the Hunger Games by the Tea Party. These novels are not great literature, but I think their approach to challenging authority and looking beyond bread and circuses for the reality of your society is sound; and I am not sure that the libertarians have chosen the best author for their own purposes here. While Katniss is (obviously) a fighter for her own freedom and that of others, I sense a pretty important thread of social justice in the books too.
July Books 18) Spend Game, by Jonathan Gash
The house lies back from the pavement. Beyond the line of dwellings is a row of gardens. Then the dreadful countryside starts, rolling fields, woods, streams, trees. Really horrible, not an antique shop anywhere. I hate the bloody stuff.
I think that this will be my last Lovejoy book for a while. The actual antique mystery bit is particularly well done here: Lovejoy's obsession with relics from the dawn of the railway age turn out to be the basis of a peculiar murder mystery, and there is a thrilling climax as he tries to outwit his enemies trapped at the wrong end of an underground tunnel. But his revolting and sometimes violent misogyny is also on full display too, and it is rather implausible that so many women can simultaneously be pursuing his affections considering how badly he treats them all. I think I'll switch to Agatha Christie for a bit.
July Books 17) The Ripple Effect, by Malorie Blackman
'For you, time is waves on a beach that you dip a toe into. For me it’s a whole ocean, all the way from coast to coast and from the surface to the ocean floor. I feel time in the very core of my being in a way that you never can.'
The latest of the short Puffin books doing a Doctor a month, and this being July it's the Seventh Doctor and Ace, slipping into a universe where the Daleks inexplicably appear to have become the good guys. Blackman puts the Doctor in an existential moral dilemma with regard to the Daleks rather well (and I notice that the Third Doctor has a similar problem with the Master in Alastair Reynolds' recent novel75 Seventh Doctor novels out there. Still, I think the originality of the plot is commendable in such a short book.
(And as far as I know, Blackman is the first woman of colour to write a Doctor Who story in any medium.)
July Books 16) Katherine Swynford: The History of a Medieval Mistress, by Jeannette Lucraft
Was she kind, gentle, warm, blessed with a good sense of humour? This we do not know, beyond the conjecture that her personality must have been of merit to hold Gaunt’s attention and love for so long.
A fairly short book, with a bit of a sense of PhD thesis pushed into book form, looking at the life and historical treatment of Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt’s lover and later his wife in the late 14th century. The core facts are interesting enough – her father appears to have been a Flemish mercenary, but she moved comfortably in royal circles and her sister married Geoffrey Chaucer, and her love affair with Gaunt was publicly acknowledged while his second wife was still living. Lucraft dwells on the scandalised treatment of the Gaunt household arrangements by later monastic chroniclers, but carefully dissects them to demonstrate that there may really have been general acceptance of the situation, with the most negative comments written some time afterwards, politically motivated and inaccurate on the facts. Indeed I wish she had gone a bit further and explicitly looked at the John of Gaunt / Katherine Swynford / Isabella of Castile relationship as a stable triad, terminated only by Isabella’s death; there are plenty of historical, literary and contemporary examples to draw from. (One favourite of mine is Peter Dickinson’s alternate twentieth-century British Royals in King and Joker.)
Lucraft then offers an interpretation of Katherine’s personal worldview as having been inspired by St Catherine of Alexandria. Here she makes a very good case for the fact of Katherine’s devotion based on the surviving iconography, but falls down a bit in interpreting what this might have meant to her subject: Catherine of Alexandria was, famously, a virgin, and Katherine Swynford, also fairly famously, was not (Swynford was the surname of her first husband, by whom she had had three children before the four she had with John of Gaunt). I think that there must be something in St Catherine’s facility in helping her devotees to overcome suffering, and also possibly her personal devotion to learning, but Lucraft disappointingly strays off the specifics into a general discussion of godly women (though I did find the parallels with Margery Kempe interesting).
Anyway, I’m going slow on my own historical project at present, but this was an interesting example of what you can learn about a person, and about history, when they were moderately important in their own right but can only be reconstructed from physical artefacts and from what other people said about them.
July Books 15) Plague of the Cybermen, by Justin Richards
‘Are we faster than them? Are they following?’ Olga demanded. ‘Where are we going? Are we lost? Will we ever get out of these tunnels alive?’
‘No, probably, not sure, absolutely not, and I hope so.’
What?’
‘Well – you asked.’
This turned out to be an interesting paired reading with Kiss of the Butterfly, in that they are both riffs on the classic vampire mythos in different ways: where James Lyon has gone right back to the roots of the legend, Justin Richards has of course gone for the Cybermen (who as
July Books 14) Kiss of the Butterfly, by James Lyon
His impression of Belgrade was one of dirty decay. He choked on the coal smoke, leaded automobile exhaust, cigarettes and diesel fumes, yet admired the awkward mix of graceful neglected old buildings and concrete communist kitsch. Street-corner black market currency dealers buzzed about like swarming bees as they chanted endlessly the Serbian word for hard currency, ‘devize, devize, devize.’ He was almost run over several times by new black Audis, BMWs and Mercedes with tinted windows, whose drivers braked for no one and rarely observed traffic lights, while the police stood by. And no one smiled.
Here it is at last: the Balkan vampire novel by my former colleague James Lyon, in which he unites a vivid impression of living in Belgrade as an American expat during the opening months of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s with some well developed vampire mythology, drawn from the lore of the region rather than from the twentieth century’s elaborations of Bram Stoker. The plot has sinister forces within the Serbian regime attempting to exploit an occult investment laid down centuries before by the Austro-Hungarian empire, with the central character a young American researcher trying to make sense of it all (and also to work through his feelings for two different Serbian girls). It’s all very smartly done, and entertaining, and clearly leaves enough unresolved threads for a sequel or two.
Links I found interesting for 27-07-2013
- Time to expose UKIP MEPs for what they really are – lazy & unprincipled
@RTaylor_MEP speaks out!
- Will the Dutch help Cameron to reform the EU?
Er, no.
- Verheugen: Beware an institutional crisis after the EU elections
…and much else besides.
- Use of Calculators
The political views of Iain M Banks, by Ken MacLeod (@amendlocke)
Links I found interesting for 26-07-2013
- Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber
The reread begins.
- The Chronicles of Amber: Nine Princes in Amber
Volume 1.
- Taking the train rather than the plane for business travel in Europe: does it work?
Sometimes, says the expert.
- Fit for a (future) king: George, Alexander, and Louis
Myself I think it’s cool that the next three kings will be odd-numbered (C3, W5, G7) following three evens (Ed8, G6, Eh2) who followed three odds (V1, E7, G5).
Links I found interesting for 25-07-2013
- Oud-Heverlee natuurwandeling door vier seizoenen
A year in the natural world in our home village; lovely.
- Twiplomacy
World leaders on Twitter
- New EU-Morocco Fisheries Protocol signed today
EU conniving in plunder of natural resources from the occupied Western Sahara (again).
- Atos Slated by DWP…
Why the fall of ATOS is not automatically a good thing…
- Jack Monroe: the face of modern poverty
‘I get infuriated by people who say, "Oh, just eat lentils." Not everyone wants to eat lentils.’
- Majority of FG Senators will oppose Kenny over Seanad
..and all 11 @Labour senators say they will vote against their 2011 manifesto commitment.
- The Peace Process Is Back
Article is less starry-eyed and more hard-headed than the title. "Many Israeli politicians claim that any pressure is counterproductive and negatively impacts peace efforts. Well, they would say that. But not only is it an obviously self-serving argument, it is also wrong."
Links I found interesting for 24-07-2013
- ATOS lose monopoly on work capability assessments after audit shows up “unacceptable” standards
Sane commentary from @caronmlindsay.
- Older, anxious and white: why UKIP are the English Tea Party
Not a perfect match, but interesting,
- Mitch McConnell and John Boehner Lose Their Grip on the Republican Party – The Daily Beast
There’s nothing like democracy (and this isn’t much like democracy).
- S/he who frames the case wins the argument on the EU
"UK politics is post-enlightenment, post-fact and post-truth".
- Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1996
"the 1996 TV Movie is, to an unbiased eye, quite clearly closer to the post-2005 TV series than any other piece of Doctor Who to that point."
Wednesday reading
Current:
Spend Game, by Jonathan Gash
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
Kraken, by China Mieville
Last books finished
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov
[Doctor Who] Plague of the Cybermen, by Justin Richards
Katherine Swynford, by Jeannette Lucraft
Kiss of the Butterfly, by James Lyon
[Doctor Who] The Ripple Effect, by Malorie Blackman
Next books
Standing in Another Man's Grave, by Ian Rankin
The Monsters and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The History of the Hobbit, vol 1: Mr Baggins, by John D. Rateliff
Books acquired in last week:
[Doctor Who] The Ripple Effect, by Malorie Blackman
Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston
The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, by Stephen Alford
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
LT unread books tally: 442.
The next number
in the sequence of pronic numbers which are multiples of increasing powers of ten:
| 2 20 600 141,000 390,000 87,900,000 11,963,000,000 |
1 x 2 4 x 5 24 x 25 375 x 376 624 x 625 9.375 x 9.376 109,375 x 109,376 |
Hope that clears things up.
A pub evening in Brussels
So there I am, out for drinks with
Links I found interesting for 23-07-2013
- @arrroberts reviews Agatha Christie’s best-selling novel
"this novel — not to labour the point, but a book *published in 1939* — is precisely about an ingenious though sadistic plot to isolate a number of clever, mostly affluent but *fundamentally wicked* people on an island, and dispose of them. Warning: includes spoilers for several classic Agatha Christie stories
- UK govt “taking action to improve the Work Capability Assessment”
Struggling to pass the buck, on a good day to bury bad news.
- How would you have fared in a Victorian School?
General knowledge quiz from 1894
- Soviet board-games, 1920-1938
featuring such riveting titles as Electrification, Revolution, Reds vs. Whites, and Maneuvers: A Game for Young Pioneers.
- Go home or face arrest: billboard crackdown on illegal immigration
Good God.
- UK’s Balance of Competence Review first 6 documents look broadly sensible
Published on a day when they will be ignored…
- Jahar’s World
The Rolling Stone article about the Boston bomber.
Number quiz
What number is next in this list?
| 2 20 600 141,000 390,000 87,900,000 |
The Australian K9 series
I have rather lapsed in writing up my rewatch of New Who, but that doesn't mean I have stopped my episode-a-day routine – I finished off the David Tennant era a month ago, and have spent the last four weeks (-ish) watching the least-known Doctor Who spinoff, the series featuring K9 as voiced by John Leeson, and partly written by Bob Baker, broadcast in 2009-10.
Leeson and Baker are I think the only creative links with the rest of Who. The series is set in a totalitarian future London in 2050, where civilisation has degenerated so badly that almost everyone now speaks with an Australian accent, and all buildings built since 2009 have been demolished. Also the climate seems to have become more tropical.
The central cast, apart from Leeson as K9, is the Professor (Robert Moloney), the only Canadian character ever to appear in the Whoniverse (or so I am told), accompanied by Starkey (Keegan Joyce) a bad boy hacker who becomes K9's special friend, Darius (Daniel Webber) who is a young rapscallion with an occasionally talking car, and Jorjie (Philippa Coulthard) as the core goodies.
Jorjie's mother June (Robyn Moore) inconveniently is something senior in the sinister Department which actually runs everything. She is actually the less sinister arm of the Department; she is locked in constant bureaucratic infighting with the evil but not terribly convincing Drake (Connor Van Vuuren) who is replaced partway through the season by the much more convincingly evil Thorne (Jared Robinson).
Who fans will be amused by the way that K9 regenerates in the first episode into a much cuter and smaller robot dog, with the ability to hover, fly, carry out detailed scientific analysis and engage in much more humorous banter than we have ever seen from any of the other versions of K9. All viewers will, I think, be irritatingly earwormed by the signature tune. But the format of the show is very much Monster Of The Week, with little pushing of the format boundaries. Even the first series of Torchwood managed better diversity of tone.
IMHO the best episodes, if you want to sample them, are The Lost Library of Ukko (although it must be pointed out that the library itself is not actually lost) and Taphony and the Time Loop. There is, however, a truly teeth-grindingly bad episode, The Cambridge Spy, which is mostly set on 23 November 1963. (Geddit?)
My recommendation to casual Who fans is that there is no real need to sit through all 26 episodes. The first two, the two in the middle that I have mentioned (plus The Curse of Anubis which has a coupe of amusingly subtle references to Who), and the last three are enough to give you a decent sense not only of what the show is about but also of why we are unlikely to see it again. (Though I see that Philippa Coulthard, who is lovely as K9's young friend Jorjie, was also one of the lead characters in Alien Surf Girls.)
OK, tomorrow it's The Eleventh Hour, again.
July Books 13) And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
Sir Thomas Legge said: “Damn it all, Maine, somebody must have killed ’em.”
“That’s just our problem, sir.”
“Nothing helpful in the doctor’s report?”
“No, sir.”
I’m getting a bit bored with Lovejoy as my bedtime reading and might give Agatha Christie a try, working scientifically through her books in order of popularity until I get tired.
I went through an Agatha Christie phase when I was about 13 and had read And Then There Were None at that time. It’s quite far from the normal format of murder mystery: ten people on an isolated island (whose name varies with the edition of the book), all invited because of a fatal incident in their personal past, are bumped off one by one. One of the ten must be the murderer; but who? The solution is just barely credible in the context of the story (requires some impressive good luck from the murderer, and failure to observe some obvious clues from his victims). But it is tautly constructed, and must have been very appealing when first published in late 1939 – no mention of the imminent war, but the previous war’s shadow lies across all the characters.
The book is of course notorious for the racism of its original title. It’s interesting that the two characters, who become the (largely sympathetic) viewpoint for the climax of the story proper, are also the most obviously racist – one of them has explicitly carried out a racist multiple murder as a colonial officer in Africa, the other is the only person to defend him. But it’s also interesting that the murder confesses to inflicting “prolonged mental strain and fear” on “the more cold-blooded offenders” who die last, so the author’s message is ambiguous. There’s a much less ambigous anti-Semitism directed at a minor character, which is not queried in the same way.
I shall persevere with this project. Murder on the Orient Express is next, and I haven’t read it or seen any of the screen adaptations (though, thanks to the spoilers generally abounding in popular culture, I do know whodunnit).
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Peril at End House | Lord Edgware Dies | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | The Moving Finger | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party | Sleeping Murder
July Books 12) Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov
“In principle we can reduce a man to the size of a bacterium, of a virus, of an atom. There is no theoretical limit to the amount of miniaturization. We can shrink an army with all its men and equipment to a size that will fit in a match-box. Ideally, we could then ship that match-box where it is needed and put the army into business after restoring it to full size. You see the significance?”
The story of a mission ministurised and injected into the bloodstream of an ailing scientist to cure him, the protagonists being four men and a woman who, this being an Asimov story, is the centre of some dubious sexual politics. The whole thing is very much in the Cold War context, the miniaturisation technology being fairly blatantly a parallel of nuclear technology.
Although I am aware of the general course of Asimov’s career, I hadn’t previously known some of the details of this book – that it was intended to be the novelisation of the film, but because Asimov finished faster than the studio it was actually published several months before the film was released; that he tweaked various details to make it more plausible than the film script; that the story it was based on was actually set in the nineteenth century. Asimov did his best with some tricky material; basically to keep the film plot going for the full 100 minutes there has to be an unexpected and implausible problem every few chapters which sets our team back. But this is not his greatest work.